Reusable Metadata At Scale: A Practical Introduction To The Icpsr Metadata Export Api

ICPSR has released a new Metadata Export API that enables librarians, repository managers, and researchers to programmatically search for and retrieve standardized, machine-readable metadata for curated ICPSR studies. Designed to support metadata reuse beyond the ICPSR catalog, the API allows users to extract study-level metadata for integration into local repositories, library catalogs, reporting workflows, and discovery services.

This poster provides a practical, use-case-driven introduction to the API. It highlights the metadata elements available for querying, including study identifiers, titles, subject terms, geographic coverage, principal investigators, funding organizations, release and modification dates, and archive ownership, and demonstrates how matching records can be exported in multiple formats suitable for downstream systems.

The poster walks through the API’s two-step workflow: submitting a query to identify records of interest and retrieving the resulting metadata package as a downloadable ZIP file. Multiple access options are demonstrated, including direct endpoint access for developers and a publicly available Postman collection that enables non-developers to explore and adapt sample queries without writing code. Example queries show to retrieve metadata for a single study, a topical archive, or a set of studies matching defined subject, geographic, or date criteria.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what metadata the API provides, how to access it with minimal technical overhead, and how it can support routine metadata extraction, reuse, and system-to-system integration in support of FAIR-aligned discovery and reuse involving ICPSR collections.